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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6573287" data-attributes="member: 27160">All fair comment, but bear in mind that neither Newton's laws or the work of Claude Navier and George Stokes sprang into being as a result of a single experiment or observation. They were the culmination of many years of work and many, many experiments by many people (that they were able to read about due to the scientifiv libraries that were developed in the "scientific revolution").The level of understanding that someone with a scientific education posesses today is in no way natural or commonplace in a historical (or even non-western modern) context. Basic science is hard; it requires years of effort by many people - in most fantasy worlds this sort of thing will be quite alien.What remains is experimentation - trying stuff to see if it works. Now, if a character in a game using the randomised method I suggest were to carry out an extensive series of experiments intended to measure the exact process of the use of chaos energy, they might find a distinct pattern and be at the same time excited and suspicious that it seems to work in surprisingly precise 5% increments... But the idea that they would instantly know whether or not the thing was possible seems totally implausible to me.Right - you might more comparably think of psychological or economic investigations as being analogous, rather than physics experiments. The basic principle of "it needs multiple, repeated, well designed (controlled and blinded) experiments by a range of observers before it's proper science" still applies, though.If you were considering a modern or roughly contemporary game, I think you might have a point, but prediction of where science might go or what it might discover in 100 or even 10 years is as good as fantasy. If someone had told even an 18-yeaar-old me that one day I would have my own suite of computers and one of them would fit in my pocket, I would have thought they were barmy; that "just didn't make sense" to me at the time...Doing back-of-the-envelope stuff for RPGs can be fun, but I run accross fatal issues with traditional "process sim", personally.Mostly, these stem from the fact that, as often implemented, the "process sim" model of reality that is taken as a base is that of just one person - the GM. This is not so bad with physics-type stuff; most of what comes up (except sci-fi with supposedly STL travel) will be Newton's laws stuff, and you either kknow those or you don't. But that, as mentioned above, is not the typical level of model we need; we need stuff more like economics, psychology and hand-to-hand combat. In my experience with the specific parts of those topics with which I am reasonably familiar, most GMs do an absolutely abominable job of modelling many of these things even vaguely correctly (or even plausibly). If they do that with the bits I know about, I assume that they are just as inaccurate with the bits I don't know about.What this arrangement leads to is a situation where the model of reality that is in use is utterly unknown to me and I assume to be largely disconnected from the real world. So, I am left playing a game of "guess what the GM is thinking". Yawn. Immersion actually becomes almost impossible, at this point, since I am concentrating on the GM's body language to pick up the "tells" that mean a plan is going to work or it's not - in short, the Expectancy Effect writ large. Follow that up with an involuntary game of "spot the heuristic" and it just becomes an experience that I find frustrating and irritating. Especially when said GM gets defensive about what he or she perceives to be the nature of reality...Compared to this, I find the paradigm of a fixed set of rules that apply to all a breath of fresh air. Dealing with "experiments" randomly means that I don't meet the situation of trying something that, for what are to me arbitrary reasons, won't work. I will at least know that an "uncertain" situation is genuinely uncertain!I agree with the explosions <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />If you watch Mythbusters a fair bit, though, you will see that most of the myths - whether they are "bust" or not - are not really cut-and-dried. Sure, the way the myth is commonly presented might not work, but some variant or modification might come close. To quote Ben Goldacre, "I think you might find it's more complicated than that"... In other words, there are very few totally clear "cannots" - just a lot of fairly nuanced limitations.Well, for a start, depending on what hit points actually represent there might be actual in-game reasons for certain characters to have more of them (I'm thinking, in part, of Birthright, here, where rulers of domains got +10hp because of the manifestation of their divine bloodline). In a wider sense, I would take the view that there must be an in-world reason for PCs to have more hit points (if that's what the game says). There really is no such thing as "rules without in-game reasons"; game rules, by definition in my view, have in-game reasons. They might not be dictated to you in the rulebook, it might instead be left to the players' imaginations, but there must be reasons; that's just fundamental to what reasons are. If you want to play in a game world where those reasons don't exist, then don't use those particular rules - but saying "I think this reason is stupid so no game rules ever should have rules that might be due to this" is just, well, pointlessly demanding.Fine. Most differences I see are like this. HârnMaster works well with BattleLust (a skirmish wargame designed for HârnWorld) in much this way; HârnMaster PCs are far more detailed than BattleLust warriors, but they fight pretty similarly. Of course, a Hârnic "adventuring party" (to the extent that such things exist) would likely come out of the situation better, but that would be due to the quality of healing they generally have access to, rather than to combat prowess, necessarily.Much the same could be said of 4E D&D, actually, in the sense that equal-level elites are typically as powerful as the PCs. Of course, the guidelines for play recommend not using such powerful encounters. That doesn't mean you cannot do it if it floats your boat, but if you want a 30-level heroic arc with the same characters (and, at least for some campaigns, we do) then it's not going to be conducive.</blockquote>

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